It is traditional in dance studios to have bars, known as dance barres, mounted along the walls with mirrors behind the bars for enabling ballet dancers to perform special exercises. Recently, exercises have been developed utilizing such bars for persons other than ballet dancers in order to enable them to perform exercises stretching particular muscles and conditioning such muscles which are not conditioned by traditional or free standing exercises. Thus, such dance barres are increasingly being used in exercise rooms for persons other than ballet dancers.
At the same time, exercises are constantly being developed which require the use of a rod to assist the person carrying out the exercise in balancing in relation to the floor or a wall. Such exercise rods are generally about four to five feet long, and have protective tips on the end so that the ends of the rod can be engaged with a wall or the floor in frictional engagement therewith so that the end of the rod will not be damaged and the rod will not slip during the carrying out of the exercise. These exercise rods are normally separate pieces of exercising equipment provided in exercise rooms of establishments which teach and supervise such exercises.
It would be desirable if such exercise rods could also function as barres such as those used by ballet dancers and could be removable so that the person exercising could, when it was desired to use an exercise rod, simply remove the bar from the wall so that it would then serve as the exercise rod.